Goldbugs, Pot Heads, and Cranks

In the Huffington Post today, Eli Lehrer uses scenes from the Libertarian Party's national convention to point out that they are the party of kooks and nuts:

If nothing else, Mark Hemingway's terrific reporting from the Libertarian National Convention will leave readers informed and amused. As Hemingway's largely sympathetic article for The Weekly Standard makes clear, the Libertarian party has a problem: its membership, while well meaning, is downright loony. The article is worth reading in full. Among other tidbits:

Activists at the party were "selling solid copper "Barter or Trade" coins with marijuana leaves imprinted on them."

Conference attendees included "Starchild" a well-known San Francisco "sex worker."

The entire convention eventually turned into a "goat rodeo"/"freak show" over arcane matters of party rules and leadership.

Lehrer writes sympathetically about libertarian goals, while finding large parts of their policy platform unworkable:

The bottom line is simple: Simply wishing that government would vanish is no substitute for figuring out how to run it. When government gets cut, it's best to target first the obvious absurdities—bailouts for beach-home owners, farm subsidies, and Warren Buffett's Social Security checks (none of which, its true are the causes of current deficits)—and be much more deliberate about fundamental reforms. Libertarians can offer practical solutions. They don't need to get in bed with the political Left. But, if they want the fusionist alliance to keep going and the political right to remain in power, libertarians are going to have to stop being nuts.